Animal Words, Animal Worlds: Introduction to Zoopoetics

Catalog description

We are surrounded by other living creatures, both in our daily lives and on the page, and yet that otherness has endless potential for surprise and wonder. The intensity of our encounters with animals generates a corresponding intensity in the language that tries to capture them. Even if language is unique to humans - a claim that is often disputed - what are we to make of animals' vital, vibrant place in the words we use and the texts we read? How do nonhuman forms of life help give shape to different forms, styles, even species of artistic expression? And what are the practical and ethical implications of focusing on animals' place in literature at a time when they are vanishing from the world around us at an ever-increasing rate? This course sets out on the trail of the animals that populate modern and contemporary French and Francophone writing. Taking as our starting point la zoopoetique, a term coined by French thinkers at the turn of this century to designate literature's many ways of relating to nonhuman life, we will discover a range of recent works whose diversity rivals that of the various species inhabiting them. From Henri Michaux's teeming assortment of nocturnal beasts to Marie Darrieussecq's (pig)tale of metamorphosis, and from Jean Echenoz's vivid portrayal of WWI trenches to Scholastique Mukasonga's rural Rwanda, each of these texts forms an ecosystem in which language itself behaves differently according to the life it encounters and embodies. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach to these animal words and worlds, for zoopoetics is not confined to literary studies: it is inseparable from a host, not just of forms of life, but also of questions stemming from the fields of anthropology, ethology, history, natural science, and philosophy. As we investigate how our own reading practices are informed by human-animal relations going back to the…